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Transform text with exceptions in Power BI and Power Query

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Recently I picked up an interesting request to transform text with exceptions: Transform the words in a column to proper case, but keep certain keywords like in a defined list.

Problem: Transform text with exeptions

Say you have a list with specific terms that shouldn’t be proper cased like so:

And you want to proper case the following column:

Convert to proper case with exceptions

So I proper case each word that is not contained in the “KeepTable”, identify the elements in the “KeepTable” in a case insensitive way and transform them into the syntax that’s specified in the “KeepTable”.

Solution

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Memory efficient clustered running total in Power BI

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Today I want to share a scenario where a running total calculation in the query editor saved a model that run out of memory when done with DAX:

Problem

The model couldn’t be refreshed and returned out of memory error with a calculated column in the fact table of over 20 Mio rows (from a csv-file). A running total should be calculated for each “JourneyID”, of which there were over 1 Mio in the table itself. This rose memory consumption during refresh by over 300 % – until it finally errored out:

Besetzung =
CALCULATE (
    SUM ( Fact[Entries] )
– SUM ( Fact[Exits] );
    FILTER (
        ALLEXCEPT ( Fact; Fact[JourneyID] );
Fact[StopId]
<= EARLIER ( Fact[StopId] )
    )
)

Solution

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Unravel cumulative totals to their initial elements in Power BI and Power Query

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Recently I came across an interesting request where someone wanted to un-cumulate their quarterly YTD-figures (green) into their single quarters values (red) like so (“Unravel cumulative totals”):

Task

Retrieve every Quarters Amount from the Quarter To Date values (“YAmount”)

Method

To retrieve this value, one would have to start with the first value in the year. This is also the value of the first quarter, but for the 2nd quarter, one would have to deduct the value of the first quarter from the cumulative value of the 2nd quarter. So basically retrieving the previous cumulative row and deduct it from the current cumulative row. Do this for every row, unless it’s the start of the year or belongs to a different account code in this example:

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Comparing Table.AlternateRows with List.Alternate in Power BI and Power Query

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I must admit that I had more than one unsuccessful attempt to try to fully understand how the List.Alternate-function works. What helped me at the end, was the function Table.AlternateRows. It pretends to be similar to List.Alternate, but holds some surprises that I will uncover in this blogpost: How Table.Alternate works Say I have the … Read more

Performance tip for List.Generate (1): Buffer your tables in Power BI and Power Query

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Lately I was working on a fairly advanced allocation algorithm on large data which forced me to search for different tricks to improve performance than those that you can find on my site here already. Background I was using List.Generate to check for every month in my table, if there was enough free capacity on … Read more

How to do a real VLOOKUP (false) in Power Query or Power BI

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When you merge tables with distinct keys in Power Query you will get the same result than the VLOOKUP-function in Excel returns (if this is new to you, check out this article for example: https://www.myonlinetraininghub.com/excel-power-query-vlookup) . But how to retrieve only the result of the first row, if the lookup-table has multiple rows with the … Read more